Omega Mu Voice: Donald E. MacLauchian, 1961

Omega Mu Voice
​Donald E. MacLauchian

I lived in the House one year and moved into a trailer in Veazie, and my last two years in Orono.  I ate at the Castle every day; never missed a weekend, a meeting, and I even slept on the couch a in the living room a time or two, if not more. Incidentally, it was from that vantage point that I got to view of my brother-in-law, Garth Folsom, playing the piano, in the middle of the night, with Tate Ma singing the song. 

Garth Folsom

Mrs. Butts, Omega Mu Housemother,
And Don Cookson, Omega Mu President

I credit my Phi Gam years with everything that I’ve ever accomplished in my career.  President Don Cookson and my roommates, Joe Cuccaro and Austin Wilkins, and my permanent assignment to the 3 - 6 a.m. fire watch, changed my life.  I have continued these many years to support the Phi Gam Foundation, and I love our very active Graduate Chapter here in D.C., – from cigar smokes to Friday night social hours and Pig Dinners.  Where else can a poor herring choker from Washington County, Maine, get to rub elbows with Supreme Court Justices, Congressmen and Governors?

"I have continued these many years to support the Phi Gam Foundation, and I love our very active Graduate Chapter here in D.C., – from cigar smokes to Friday night social hours and
​Pig Dinners.  Where else can a poor herring choker from Washington County, Maine, get to rub elbows with
Supreme Court Justices, Congressmen and Governors?"

Joseph T. Cuccaro

Austin H. Wilkins, Jr

I left Veazie in August of 1961, where I had accepted a job with the Maryland Department of Forests and Parks.  My BS was in Forestry, and I spent my first summer in Maryland working for the park division on such glorious jobs as garbage truck duty and lawn mowing.  By the fall of 1962, when President Kennedy activated the reserves, I was transferred to replace a park superintendent in Montgomery County, Maryland.  After the missile crisis, I moved to the Laurel, Maryland, office to become the District Supervisor for the seven counties of southern Maryland.

In the Maryland Park Service, where I started emptying trash barrels, I became Director in 1969 occupying several positions on my way to the Director’s job, including training officer where I wrote the first ever training manual for park rangers. In 1977, I was assigned to be State Forester.  Two years later, Forests and Parks were reconnected and I found myself Director of both.  Later Fisheries and Wildlife were combined under my leadership.  In the late eighties, I was appointed by the Governor as Assistant Secretary for the Department of Natural Resources, where I oversaw the operational programs of the Department.  I retired from state service and moved my tent to Capitol Hill in 1992.

In DC, I worked for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which represented the several states of the United States and served to protect the states’ tenth amendment rights as well as to advocate for the various programs that had impacts, both positive and negative in federal fora, on state resource management programs.  I spent 16 years working as a lobbyist and retired from that position in 2008.

I then went to work for the fur and fashion industry, and, while I still maintained some involvement in state-based fur and trapping issues, my focus was on the research work being done in cooperation with the EU and Canada and the US Department of Agriculture based in Fort Collins. The international standards organization’s requirements for trap standards was a major challenge, one that we had negotiated in Milan, Paris, Geneva, and Brussels.  That research project has been cited as the largest and most significant wildlife management research project of its time.  It continues today.

As I reflect on the time since I left the Castle, the things of which I am most proud are the roles that I played in the development of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay Program, where I was one of the original five that gathered weekly to craft a program to reverse the decline of the health of the Chesapeake Bay; my work as the state representative with the Department of State and the Office of the President (US Trade) in negotiating our position on furbearer management; putting together a group that later turned into the Partnership for Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC); and my work at establishing the role of North American Fish and Wildlife Resource Management in various fora like the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species; the RAMSAR Convention on wetlands preservation; and various agreements dealing with international avian flyways.​

I credit my Phi Gam years with everything that I’ve ever accomplished in my career. 

“What if the space be long and wide,
That parts us from our brother’s side
A soul-joined chain unites our band,
And memory links us hand in hand.”
(Phi Gamma Delta fraternity song)

​Fraternally,
Chip Chapman, ’82
Perge